Fah Kiew Tu

Yeah you just have to pick your target & your moment. GF's boss didn't like losing arguments based on facts and knowledge expressed politely and firmly. I came up out of the poor working class part of Australia's biggest city on a decent free education and have never forgotten it. I'm quite happy to get insults/compliments similar to yours. FKT

Yeah but dithering over a micron plus/minus is OK as far as I'm concerned. Got to be running everything in a temperature controlled environment for it to really matter. FKT

One of my GF's ex-bosses called her an over-educated bitch. That was funny. FKT

That's why I never call myself a software engineer. I'm a software designer. If Brent Swain can call himself a yacht designer, then I can certainly claim to be a software designer. I'd never make a claim to be a professional engineer (but I could definitely be certified). I'm a scientist with a lot of OJT engineering knowledge and practical skills but not the full suite of theory behind it. But I don't care, if I need that I just pay someone else who can do it. FKT

One of the standouts for me is the spineless complicity of the Senate in letting the President ride rough-shod over long established rules and IMO the constitution. Here I'm thinking of the 'advise and consent' bit for Cabinet officers. How many 'acting' ones has he had and how many have never been confirmed? This has *got* to be bullshit. He should get 2 picks for each position at each vacancy and if both are rejected then the Senate and Congress sitting in a joint session appoints someone for him. No vote within 60 days equals automatic rejection to stop gaming the system. And Executive orders. I can see the point of those to get things done in a dire emergency situation but they should have an automatic expiry time and be unable to be renewed absent a vote, and even then only for a defined further period. After that present legislation or fuck off. FKT

Article in the Australian today, aimed directly at the 'faux outrage' Twitterati like Meli. Made the point - which was bleeding obvious if you spent 1/10 of a second thinking - that the cartoon was aimed directly at *Biden* not Harris. But of course she'll never read it that article. It's outside her 'safe space'. FKT

Because machine tools were calibrated in thousandths of an inch. Nowadays hopefully you have a DRO and just push the button to your desired units and backlash et al is a thing of the past. Hopefully... FKT

But it won't. Assume Biden/Harris win and furthermore The Dems get a Senate majority as well as holding Congress. I'm going out there and saying that they'll make no substantive change to anything that restricts Presidential authority because now *they* will be controlling the levers of power. FKT

Where can I buy some of those? My daughters would love them. They have much the same SOH as I do. Bonus if I can get one to fit my less than 1 y/o grandchild. FKT

Of course it can be done, I wear rigger's gloves a lot of the time. Also the black nitrile ones, they're pretty good for feel, not so good for cuts, punctures and useless for welding. The danger is getting the glove caught in the rotating machinery. Unless it tears away *very* easily, when it snags it will pull you in and there goes your arm, face, and who knows what else. Many people have been injured or killed in this manner. Ditto for long hair, that's injured or killed people too if it gets caught up. You really do not have sufficient reaction time, my toolroom lathe can run up to 3000 rpm and has a 5 HP motor. The big lathe, not as fast but a 10HP motor. When I'm wearing gloves I'm *very* careful not to get my hands near the rotating cutters or workpiece. I'm in my late 60's and still have all my fingers. Really like to keep it that way. OTOH I injured my ring finger in my very early 20's and that was the last time I've worn a ring of any sort. As for being an office engineer being a put-down, of course it is. They deserve it, exceptions for older people who've been there and done that. Nothing to do with the sex of the engineer though. Everything to do with 'designing' stuff that's difficult to impossible to build. If you've a thin skin, you'd better not ever ask a machinist their opinion of engineers. Just because you can draw it in Solidworks doesn't mean it can be machined. Not to mention dimensioning everything to 4 decimal places because that's the default on your CAD package and never ever putting tolerances on measurements. FKT

Does she work with moving/rotating machinery? Would you like her to keep *all* her fingers? Engineers, machinists and others who do hands-on work with machinery typically don't wear rings or other jewellery. I don't even wear a wrist watch. FKT

BFD. Whole bunch of them are my neighbours. They're fucking ashamed of what happens in those settlements. Are you going to dispute the statistics WRT sexual abuse, domestic violence, drug & alcohol abuse et al? If so, lay it out. But you won't because you know damn well that the reality is shocking. Or maybe you don't but that'd be because of your usual wilful ignorance and determination to deny reality. Meanwhile, a bit of arithmetic WRT the Kamala Harris pick. It was decided somewhere, by consensus I assume, that the Democrat VP pick had to be both 'black' and female. 14% of US citizens identify as black. Assuming a 50-50 sex ratio, that means 7% are female. So in essence, one might say that Kamala Harris is the best choice available out of a total of 7% of the population of the USA, because the other 93% were excluded from consideration due to their being the wrong sex and colour. And you're outraged by Leak's cartoon? ROFLMAO. You guys fucking deserve the mockery. FKT

Wouldn't bet on it, but if that day ever comes, health insurance and corporate hospital/medical centre CEO's had better be living in Switzerland or similar. FKT

FTFY. https://www.grammarly.com/blog/disinterested-uninterested/ FKT - pedant

Ha ha ha ha ha. Must be nice to live in that bubble of denial Meli. Not even worth giving you references, you wouldn't read them and wouldn't understand them anyway. Which section of Australia's population tops the stats for child abuse both physical & sexual, alcohol & drug abuse and domestic violence? Hint: it's not the Somali refugees in Melbourne. FKT

I think that this cartoon, just like the Bill Leak one WRT aboriginals, finds a very soft and tender spot in the bleeding heart brigade. They react with outrage because they *really* don't like to look at the image that the cartoons portray. Which means that the cartoonist has got it spot-on. They're supposed to be confronting and depending on your POV quite offensive. If you don't like that, consider what Biden actually said. That comes across, at best, as utterly patronising. He was the one who gave the cartoonist such a wonderful opportunity for a free kick. You guys simply don't want to acknowledge just how racist you really are and this cartoon has confronted you with it in a way that you can't avoid. Of course you find it offensive. Suck it up sunshine. FKT

You all are missing the point here - the Australian cartoonist generally *intends* to offend everyone. So he's really hit the bullseye on this one. Yeah it's racist, sexist & ageist & quite offensive. It was meant to be. FKT

Exactly my attitude. FKT

Be aware that the Lavac I have has a fairly small bowl. You need to think about this if you're on the large side. I think there's a bigger bowl version, don't know for sure. Main point being, non-boat types used to a normal sized toilet seat may have just as many issues as they would with a composting toilet. The solution to this is obvious... FKT

Glare is definitely an issue, not so sure about overheating for just a screen. My Pi with 7" touchscreen inside a perspex box hasn't had any issues so far. The problem is, you need to interact with OpenCPN or any other package. How do you plan to do that? If it's always via the below decks console, go for it, should work fine. The deck display is just a data output then which is what I use my Pi for. I'll be swapping over to the 2200 nit brightness screen as soon as I get back to boat stuff. There are a lot of screens out there that claim to have daylight visibility but every time I tried to confirm details with the vendors on Ali Express or similar, I could never get a straight answer. I *really* do not like Toecutter's comment WRT powering the Pi on & off via the battery switch. The thing is running a linux variant - that means it has a shit-ton of open files at all times. If you do this, sooner or later you're going to corrupt something. Yes the modern versions of the o/s have gotten very good at recovering from a power outage, this is still IMO a bad practice. Funnily enough the Simrad MFD is made so you can hard-wire it to the ship power supply and cannot turn it off except via cutting power. This is optional but obviously it's designed to deal gracefully with it. If you get a Pi or 2 and then start looking into what you can do with Node Red and other open source software you too will think that nearly all marine electronics suppliers are 20+ years in the past. FKT

I really hope we don't let them in. People with attitudes like theirs shouldn't expect shelter from Godless socialist countries like Australia or New Zealand anyway. They should go somewhere they feel at home. FKT

Yeah the Pi's are great little single board computers. The 3B models were pretty good but the 4B model is great. Runs very hot though. I expect I'll end up with 3 on my boat and a spare in a Pelican case somewhere. With them all running VNC server you can take control/export the screen display anywhere you like. You can in fact have a Pi/normal screen setup below and use VNC viewer on a tablet to get the deck display. But you still have to deal with the tablet battery life, lack of water resistance and overheating in direct sunlight. There are ways of addressing all those issues but each introduces others. As for Simrad obsolescence, I have a multi-decade familiarity with marine electronics, their fragility and the rate that they go obsolete. You opened the box? Sorry, it's obsolete, buy a new one. That's why I tried the DIY path first. If I can get my hands on one of those screens at a reasonable price I may have another go at it. FKT

Quite right on the screen size, the 12" Simrad is bloody expensive. I decided the 9" one would be adequate. WRT charts, this may be a country thing. I - ahem - have a lot of electronic charts that cost me nothing. As do a lot of cruisers. And the Simrad plotter included C-Map charts for Australia anyway. I quite like Navionics on the tablet too. It sort of talks to the Simrad wifi but I haven't really bothered with it a lot. Agree about planning etc which is why I'm going to put OpenCPN on one of my below decks Pi's . Agree it can all be fragile/brittle too. As an old unix person the scripting and command line stuff doesn't worry me at all but stacked dependencies and having to continually upgrade 30 things because you change one gets a bit old. Though for the Pi OS (Raspian) it does seem very well sorted - a few apt-get commands and you're done. The release of OpenPlotter was pretty solid once I finally got it working but it took a few iterations. I'm looking forward to installing a Pi 4 running from a USB SSD. That will be a nice performance and - hopefully - reliability upgrade. I intend to take a very close look at PyPilot too, still gathering various hardware bits ATM. FKT

Yeah. Ignoring VAT that translates to $835. Then add Australian GST 10% now $919. Raspberry Pi 4 at $100, now $1019. Power supply, mouse, keyboard etc maybe another $100 all up, now $1119. Still need to add the various senders you require, a GPS and depth sounder at minimum for me. $50 for a puck type USB GPS, echosounder interface (iKonvert) $200 or so for NMEA0183 to NMEA2000. Transducer itself is a wash, both systems need one. Don't know what a NMEA2K card/shield is for the Pi as I installed a Digital Yacht IKommunicate black box as I wanted NMEA0183 data over Ethernet. IIRC my Simrad plotter/MFD cost me $1400 including a CHIRP transducer I didn't mount. Yep. https://www.whitworths.com.au/simrad-go9-xse-fishfinder-chartplotter-with-active-imaging-3-in-1-transducer This is the exercise I ran through to get to the decision point that it simply wasn't worth the hassle for me. I just wanted a weather deck display that worked, I already had enough projects to keep me busy until I'm 150 years old. Rather think about a home-brew autopilot as buying one for my steering setup is going to be $$$$. Someone else, different priorities and desires. FKT

And an indicative price for the DLF1268-I DLH1268-I SLD1268-I model is.... ? Happy for you to PM me about it if you would or anything close to that. I spent a lot of time on Ali Express and similar trying to source something and gave up. Mind you that screen only solves one of the 3 issues for an open weather deck display. That still leaves touchscreen and waterproof. I do know they're out there but I simply couldn't sort through the options effectively when I looked. It's not my field. Once the price point starts getting close to that of a Simrad plotter for example, why bother is where I got to. And it wasn't the total cost, I spend quite a bit on R&D projects without a second thought. It was the conclusion that I was pursuing failure and when I get to thinking that I tend to cut my losses and re-evaluate when something changes. The 7" digital camera monitor I bought was $400 roughly and is 2200 nits. That's the next upgrade for the deck display; currently there's a Pi in a SmartPi case with 7" touchscreen in a waterproof perspex box mounted above the chartplotter. The screen isn't bright enough in direct sunlight though. Playing with this stuff is entertaining and a great excuse to buy more gadgets. FKT